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#1 When spouses’ high expectations are thwarted, they are prone to jump to negative conclusions about the other person’s state of mind and the state of the marriage. This is known as mind reading, and it is fraught with danger because we cannot read other people’s minds.

#2 When we are frustrated or disappointed, our mental apparatus predisposes us to make negative explanations for other people’s behavior, and to project a negative image onto them. We then act on these misinterpretations and attack the negative image that we have projected.

#3 The cognitive principles that help couples overcome the tendency to make unjustified judgments and project distorted images of each other are: we can never know the state of mind of another person, we depend on signals to inform us about the attitudes and wishes of other people, and we use our own coding system to decipher these signals.

#4 The act of mind reading can produce inaccurate predictions that can lead to unnecessary upset or false sense of security. For example, Lois thought that Peter was angry at her because of something she had done, and she made the prediction that Peter would break off their relationship.

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